Tag: Events of the Day

Share This Post

This is a repost, but it always bears repeating!

Hey folks, I’ve mentioned this before on some previous Halloween’s, but I think it bears repeating. I write from my experience as a one-time employee of one of our nation’s many fine pizza-serving and delivering establishments. Basically, tonight’s Halloween, so you might consider refraining from ordering a pizza for delivery this evening. Why?

For one thing, since there are tons of kids about on the streets, with many of those dressed in dark clothing, many pizza delivery places will be quoting abnormally long delivery times, both because business might be up and because they may well be instructing their drivers to take as long as they need to deliver. Halloween is NOT the night to order a pizza and expect quick service. Believe me.

Secondly, if your household is not observing Halloween and will therefore be leaving all of your outside lighting off in order to dissuade trick-or-treaters, please oh please don’t order a pizza for delivery. Delivering pizzas at night isn’t rocket science, but it’s not ridiculously easy, either, and running deliveries on Halloween is actually pretty stressful when you’re trying to watch out for kids and figure out what house to go to. And if your lights are off, it makes your house even harder to find.

If you still feel that you just must order a pizza for delivery, despite the above, then at the very least, have some sympathy for the driver and increase your tip accordingly. Or just give him a tip at all, for you cheap jerks out there.

Or, you could just go get a pizza yourself, showing up early at the pizza place so you can eat before going out trick-or-treating or whatever. But if you do that, remember, you’re not the only person thinking along those lines; the pizza place will likely be getting an abnormally large number of orders significantly earlier than usual, which will have the expected slowing effect on service.

So, if pizza is on the menu tonight, adjust your service expectations accordingly and don’t be jerks. Or, just make it yourself!

Share This Post

As I write this, we here in the Buffalo Niagara region are awaiting the increased pounding we’re going to receive as Hurricane Sandy’s course takes her on a path that will give us what is, compared to what the Jersey Shore and NYC Metro areas are receiving, a glancing blow. But a glancing blow from a hurricane, even as it diminishes to a tropical depression, can be quite a hairy thing.

At this point, what we’re expecting is high wind and a lot of rain. The ground is already wet from rains in the days ahead, and quite soft; the trees have grown their root systems to anchor against usual winds from the south and west, whereas this storm will be giving us winds from the north. So there’s quite a lot of potential for ugliness as this storm unfolds. Currently, its path is forecast to take the center of the storm on a course about sixty miles east of Casa Jaquandor.

As this happens, I’m thinking back on some weather events I recall from years past….

:: The Ash Rain of Portland. I have no idea what date this was, save that it happened either in 1980 or 1981. It was a cloudy, rainy day in the Portland, OR area, which isn’t all that remarkable in itself…except that Mt. St. Helens had just erupted, so the rain deposited about an inch of wet volcanic ash on everything. Dad was off at work, so it fell to me to shovel and hose all that ash off our driveway. This, as I recall, took me most of the day.

:: The tornadoes of Kane, PA, in 1985. Kane is a town about an hour south of Allegany, NY, where I grew up, and on one night in late spring, there was some volatile weather that led to tornadoes down there. At some point not too long after that, we drove through Kane on our way to Pittsburgh to see some relatives and family friends, and for the first time I saw actual tornado damage. It was something to behold. I’d always envisioned tornadoes as just destroying tons of stuff, and it did, but I hadn’t realized how localized the destruction was. We’d drive through quarter-mile-wide sections of forest that were leveled, and then we’d pass through a sharp line back to forest again. Ditto the houses; you’d see a house leveled next door to one that had lost a few windows. It was really amazing…and scary.

:: The Storm of the Century, 1993. This happened on a weekend that I was supposed to go back to college, from a spring break at home. An enormous storm formed that blanketed half the country, it felt like. My parents drove me to Clarion, PA, where I was to rendezvous with a guy I knew, with whom I would drive back to school in Iowa. The snow was already quite heavy as we drove what was normally a 90 minute trek to Clarion, and this was while the storm’s center was still in Georgia. Yup, it got worse. A lot worse.

The guy and I ended up staying in a hotel overnight in Clarion as the storm pounded the hell out of the entire Eastern seaboard; I’d later learn that it took my parents something like six hours to get home. The next morning it was all over but the digging, so we set out for Iowa, going very slowly at first. All the Interstates were closed in PA, and I remember crossing into Ohio near where I-80 enters PA, and seeing hundreds of semis and cars waiting for the road to open. What was really weird about that storm was that we didn’t really have to drive far to get out of the big snowfall region, and that it all melted in days anyway, since the storm was so late.

:: The Storm of November 2000. This one hit Buffalo not long after we moved here from the Southern Tier, and it was a doozy, resulting in kids snowed in at their schools, disastrously snarled traffic downtown, and The Wife, who was starting her new job, snowed in there, as well. It was the first time she’d been apart from me since The Daughter had been born. I wasn’t working at the time, so it wasn’t an enormous trainwreck, but wow…that one was brutal.

:: And then, a year later, it happened again, as something like seven feet piled up right where we lived at the time. Ouch. Worse was that The Wife was snowed in again at work! We were OK at home, since I was snowed in with my Mother-In-Law, who was visiting at the time. As I recall, we didn’t leave the apartment for three whole days. For years we would have a running joke that my in-laws never once visited Buffalo when the weather was any good. Even when they visited in summer, it was during a rainy cold snap.

:: The October Surprise storm. This is the most recent of the notorious Buffalo storms, happening in 2006. It was a lake-effect storm that dumped quite a bit of snow, although as I recall, the snow amounts themselves weren’t unheard of. What was harsh this time was that it happened in early October, before most of the trees had managed to drop their leaves, so the branches ended up getting piled with snow. As the weight increased, branches began breaking…on thousands of trees throughout the region. This resulted, of course, in huge power outages that lasted longer than a week in some places.

On the morning after the storm, I was driving to work. It was slow going, but I was moving along fine until I reached the top of a bridge right by The Store and got hung up on a big hunk of ice and snow. I wasn’t budging from there. The guy behind me is in an SUV and says, “I gotta get through…do you mind if I nudge you with my bumper?” I weighed the option, considered that the car wasn’t really my favorite anyway, and said, “Sure, bring it.” Which he did. I gave the guy the green-light to rear-end me. And it worked! Huzzah!

So, what weather-related adventures have you all had?

Share This Post

You’d think that after doing the whole blogging and social networking thing for as long as I’d have, I wouldn’t be surprised that a tweet I quickly tossed off after reading about what a cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch Mitt Romney is actually got some attention, but…yeah, it’s a nice surprise. In a collection of reaction tweets to Romney’s waving-of-the-flag for conservative assholedom, Andrew Sullivan quoted mine. Woot!

Share This Post

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. “Come aboard,” I say. “I will take your coin for passage.” One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

“Please,” a young man says as he turns to me, “I have to go home to my daughters.”

“You are going home now,” I reply. “To the home where all eventually return.” Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

“This can’t be,” a woman cries out. “My mother needs me.”

“She will be with you soon enough.”

“When?” Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

“I cannot say,” I reply. “The Ferryman has no hand in Fate.”

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

“Where will you take us?” someone asks.

“To the place you are promised,” I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. “What is that?” he asks.

“It is the City of Dead Works,” I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

“I don’t understand,” someone else says. “The City of Dead Works?”

“Aye,” I reply. “Behold!”

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

“That one looks Egyptian,” a woman says.

“The Great Library of Alexandria,” I tell her. “Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead.”

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

“The Temple of Solomon,” I say.

“There are ships in the harbor,” says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

“I don’t understand,” a young man says. “Why this City? Why here?”

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

“Who lives in that city?” It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

“No one lives there,” I tell him. “The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires.”

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

“We will be there soon,” I say. “Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold.” No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

Share This Post